michel majerus - noch ein bild

Das sagt der/die Veranstalter:in:

The 11th solo exhibition of work by Michel Majerus at neugerriemschneider, noch ein bild, presents an early group of small-format paintings created during his latter years as a student, many of which have remained unseen since. In these, Majerus sheds the constraints of oil-on-board composition, critically making use of acrylic paints, unconventional materials such as particle board or plywood, pop culture-derived motifs and a serial approach, presaging the artistic facets that were to become central to his practice. Edge-to-edge logos, abstractions gridded or repeated, surreal scenes and characters reminiscent of those from comic books fuse here to a comprehensive ensemble formative for Majerus’ apprehension of painting as an engagement with the principles of space. These images act as emblems of this innovative spirit, attesting to a freedom in selecting, combining and installing work enabling the artist to create an oeuvre over the following ten years that served as a prescient prelude to the omnipresence of the visual in today’s culture.

The paintings on view were all created in the early 1990s as Majerus emerged from his years as a student at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart into life as a working artist in post-reunification Berlin. Under the tutelage of K.R.H. Sonderborg and Joseph Kosuth, among other like-minded students and within a new creative scene buzzing with off spaces and a forward-thinking schedule of institutional events including Künstlerhaus Stuttgart’s conference “A New Spirit in Curating?,” Majerus allowed Stuttgart to play a crucial role in his development, familiarizing him with the protagonists of the era’s art world and introducing him to the cooperative structures of the artistic community. From early on, Majerus would deploy imagery from high culture, pop culture and the everyday in equal measure, co-opting them as compositional elements. Motif, medium and texture became the subjects of focused research into how they could be combined to dissolve barriers between painting and space, recontextualizing the pairing in the process. This new understanding was the impetus for the 1991 silkscreen-printed banners that hung densely along a hallway of the Stuttgart State Academy, largely ignoring its structure, while an exhibition the following year with fellow student Susa Reinhardt, hosted at a squat in Berlin, fully interacted with the architecture of the venue, featuring works painted on scrap wood.

Majerus’ acrylic painting Bunte (1992) from this group of works is an early example of how he would come to use the language of commercial imagery, here appropriating the logo of the eponymous tabloid, and in turn, hinting at its voyeuristic tendencies. A red ground positioned behind white, sans-serif, black-bordered lettering approximates the magazine’s logo, compressing it to allow tension to mount. Sleeping (1992) is, by contrast, rendered in oil paints. It sees a sleeping character whose legs appear to have just been amputated at the knees. The presumed perpetrator flees the scene with a bloody saw. While the composition itself recalls drawings by Wilhelm Busch, the work’s title brings to mind Andy Warhol’s five-hour-long experimental film Sleep (1964), starring a slumbering John Giorno - a multipartite referential action representative of Majerus’ open use of diverse art-historical moments, leveraged and joined to keys to his own practice. Majerus’ Eine gute Idee (1992) likely finds its roots in a comic book - a fusion of imagery and text that would also become a core tenet of the ethos that was on full display in shows such as his 1994 solo exhibition gemälde at neugerriemschneider - and pictures a figure trudging through a snowy landscape, uttering “Eine gute Idee” (“A good idea”). In displacing this scene, Majerus strips it of its original meaning and relocates it in abstract time and space. Sharing its dimensions with other works from that early exhibition, Majerus begins to form his affinity for the common size of 60 x 60 cm, which he would go on to use extensively to depict a wide range of freely configurable motifs throughout his career.

This fall, early work by Majerus will also be on view at Matthew Marks Gallery. While noch ein bild in Berlin takes as its subject the late years of the artist’s studies, the New York exhibition will feature large-format canvases painted between 1991 and 1993, and a selection of works produced in Berlin from 1995. Together, the pairing of shows forms a concise picture of Majerus’ practice in its formative years, presenting a uniquely developed visual vocabulary that had its institutional debut in 1996 at Kunsthalle Basel.

To coincide with noch ein bild, the Michel Majerus Estate will host the first event in their “Lectures on Lectures” series providing first-time access to the lecture-performances that Majerus held at museums and art schools throughout his career. These talks, each providing a rare look into the artist’s process of conceptualization and creation, will be accompanied by discussions, presentations and displays of works by the artist that place his musings in a broader context. “Meine Sicht auf Polke” (“My view on Polke”), a performance by Majerus engaging with the work of Sigmar Polke, realized for a series of events accompanying the 1997 exhibition Sigmar Polke: Die drei Lügen der Malerei at Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, will inaugurate the Estate’s program on September 13. Susanne Kleine, who initially extended the invitation to Majerus nearly 30 years ago, will join to speak about the event and its pairing of artists.

The work of Michel Majerus (1967 - 2002) has been the subject of international institutional solo exhibitions including those at Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg (2023, 2006); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2022); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2022); Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg (2022); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2022); Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld (2018); CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux (2012); Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Stuttgart (2011); Kunsthaus Graz, Graz (2005); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2005); Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Hamburg (2005); Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover (2005); Tate Liverpool, Liverpool (2004); Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2003); and Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (1996). Majerus participated in the 48th Venice Biennale (1999) and Manifesta 2 in Luxembourg (1998).

For further information, please contact: mail@neugerriemschneider.com.